Ian McNee in…

ROADKILL

A Threaded Moon Tie-In

By Hunter Lambright

Los Angeles

“Death walks among us.”

I said this as I paced the small walkway between the bar and the booths in the small diner where we had camped out. I could just make out my reflection in the mirror that lined the kitchen end of the bar through the side of my red-tinted glasses. There were five of us stuck in here together, and the mirror was the only way I could see all of us at once.

“Ian, would you stop being so morbid? I’m trying to figure out how we’re going to survive this if it lasts longer than you think it will,” muttered the woman behind the counter. Her plastic nametag let me know that her name was “Debbi :).” She was attractive, couldn’t have been more than thirty, and had beautiful brown curls that came down past her shoulders. This was her diner that we were stuck in, and you could tell that at least half of her annoyance was directed at me more than the cabin fever or the storm of vampires in the city.

“Morbid?” I asked. “Being morbid is driving down the same stretch of road all day and watching the dead raccoon move further and further down the street during rush hour, noting how less and less of it seems to be there. This? This isn’t being morbid. This is being realistic.”

I pointed up at the sign that now hung in place of “Yes! We are OPEN!” sign. “See that sign? It says ‘Home Sweet Home,’ and it’s the only thing keeping those vampires coming in from this rather public establishment. All you have to do is wait till the sun comes out. If anything, it’s me who has something to be worried about, and that’s the bad magic that seems to be going around.”

“Whaddya mean?” asked a surly-looking man hunched over the bar, smoking his sixth cigarette in the past hour. His beer-enlarged body protected the mound of ashes he’d collected since this nightmare began. I happened to have found out that his name was Ray earlier, though he was convinced by his rudimentary knowledge of the Butcher novels that my knowing his name would let me turn him into a frog. Quite frankly, I wouldn’t even need to know that much. “Death among us, bad magic,” Ray grunted. “What are you fuckin’ talking about?”

I sighed, then began to pace the length of the diner again. “When I say death walks among us, I mean it literally, because vampires are literally dead. Their hearts no longer pump their own blood. That means, with them walking the streets tonight, the dead walk among us. Right. And about the bad magic, again, that’s exactly what I meant. I happen to have a fine handle on good magic. The people who’re out there tonight, commanding vampires and blocking out the sun for hours? That’s bad magic.”

Ray stood up. Uh-oh. “You patronizing me, magic man? You gonna save us by having me pick a goddamn card already? Or are we gonna figure out how to get the hell back home by ourselves? I’m sick of sitting her staring out the windows and doing jack shit about this, man!”

I sighed again, this time with a little more oomph. “It doesn’t work like that. We’ve been over this how many times now, Ray? You saw what happened to the first guy who left, didn’t you? Three steps out the door, and they scooped him up, ate him right in front of us. It’s not about how much garlic Debbi has in the kitchen or if Father John can bless a few tubs full of water. It’s not in the cards tonight. Something else is supposed to happen.”

A young man in the corner perked up at the sound of his name. “Uh…actually, I’m not sure I even could bless water. I’m not exactly ordained, Mr. McNee. Not yet, anyway…” John looked back down as I met his eyes, embarrassed.

“See? Point in question. Besides, I know you don’t believe in this magic stuff, Ray, but I happen to know that something is going to happen to get us out of this situation. It was in the tarot,” I said confidently, at least until the fifth inhabitant of the diner, a girl at the bar, spat out her mouthful of Coke in laughter.

“You read this in the fucking tarot?” asked the girl. Her hair was dyed black, and she looked like she belonged more on a college campus than in a diner. Of course, the three cups of coffee she’d had before the sun didn’t come up probably answered the question of why she was here in the first place, but that was neither here nor there.

I smiled, and hoped it didn’t look like the snarl it was hiding. “Exactly. How do you think I knew to be here, where I am, saving your butt by making this place into a ‘home’ with a threshold at the exact last second?” I looked around the diner. “Hell, I’d rather be in Cleveland right now, and Cleveland freaking sucks.”

“If all this is true, then why haven’t you done a single thing to get us the hell outta here? I don’t wanna be in L.A. anymore. Place went to hell a long time before the vampires came,” said the girl. Erin, I think her name was. She pursed her lips over the straw and began blowing bubbles in her Coke.

“It doesn’t work that way,” I said. I took off my glasses and massaged the bridge of my nose. “There are four types of magic. Each one gets traced back to one of the four elements. Bad guys have a thing for fire magic. It’s destructive, and it’s painful to boot. Not too many people use water magic anymore, and earth magic has a lot more to do with swords and cups than spells and sorcery. I happen to be a big fan of wind magic, which is correlated with light and the heavens, which is why it’s powerful, because it’s good. You follow me so far?”

Erin cocked an eyebrow and nodded as she continued to blow bubbles in her Coke. The liquid fizzed dangerously near the lip of the cup.

“Right. So I use wind magic a lot of the time, but it’s got this dangerous balance. You wouldn’t believe how hard it is to tune a wind from between a breeze to a hurricane. It’s not fun. And that’s why I sucked bad enough at magic to not become the new Sorcerer Supreme—I have a problem with finesse.” Actually, there were a multitude of reasons, but I didn’t think we had time for my life’s story. And I’ve grown up a lot since then, anyway. No big deal. Just don’t tell Doctor Strange.

“So why haven’t you just whipped us out of here again?” Erin asked, twirling a finger in her hair aimlessly. “You talked in a circle around the question.”

“Right. So the thing is, whoever pulled this thing up did it with a backing of fire magic. It’s dark and destructive. And yes, I’m simplifying this to make it sound like something out of The Dresden Files, because that’s waaaaay easier than things actually are, but the point is, I can’t undo it without the light. They took away the light and any balance I might have had. Plus, it looks like a timed spell. Those are more powerful,” I said, letting out an exasperated sigh. “That made zero sense to you at all, am I right?”

“If it’s timed,” chimed in John, “shouldn’t that make it less powerful? It seems like there would be less…magic…involved.”

“That might be true, but that doesn’t make it less likely to stick,” I said. My eyebrows furrowed as I tried to think of a good analogy. I failed. “Hm. Erin, let me borrow your glass for a second. It might help me make this make sense.”

The condensation on the glass glistened in the light of the diner. I walked over to a table and grabbed a salt shaker, spinning open the top as I made my way back to the glass. I then dumped about half the shaker into my hand. “Look at all this salt. Pretend each grain is a measure of the amount of magic I throw into a spell.” I threw the salt sideways at Erin’s glass. Some of the salt stuck to the condensation, but the majority hit the counter and scattered.

“See? I threw a lot of salt, and it was more powerful, but not all of it stuck as well. Now, when I throw less magic, for a timed spell…” I pulled out a pinch of salt and threw it at the other side of the glass. The vast majority of the pinch stuck to it, leaving only a few grains to hit the counter. “It may be less powerful because it’s only supposed to be around for however long, but it sticks, and it’ll be that much harder to get off. In fact, I’m afraid to ask what happens if someone tries to do it, like what would happen if someone tried to escape Los Angeles out from under this field tonight…”

KRAKOOM!

“Duck and cover!” shouted Ray, diving over the bar and into the kitchen area. Everyone took cover while I stood there, staring over my green-tinted glasses at the sight out what used to be the window.

“Crap,” I muttered. “Looks like somebody else asked for me.”

“Uh, Ian?” Debbi’s voice cracked. She pointed at the storefront. “The window? The vampires?”

“Dammit!” I yelled. The outburst of energy had shattered the glass. I had to choose between protecting the people I had spent the last many hours with or helping the most-likely-unconscious person or people who just tried to get out of town. “Dammit, dammit, dammit!”

“Debbi! You and John go to the kitchen and fill as many pots as you can with water. Then have John bless them!” I ordered.

“But I’m not orda—” John began.

“Just do it!” I shouted, moving my hands and fingers in a arc toward the window. “Ray, Erin, you’re with me! There are people out there who are going to be eaten if we don’t help them, got it?”

“I am not going out there!” Ray shouted. “Fuck that, man!”

Erin was stoic as ever. “What he said. Fuck that.”

I flicked my hands and three of the diner’s tables adhered to the shattered glass. “Fine! I’ll be back in a few minutes, then!” And then, I showed my maturity and slammed the door behind me as I stormed out.

It felt like it should have been raining outside, the way the winds were reacting toward their enclosure by the magicks that had been wrought across the city. Instead, I knew that somewhere in the off-and-on stillness, there were vampires searching for human beings in the streets. But my well-being was of little concern to me, because, well, I was hardly making a stir compared to the three individuals who had just been repelled back into the city by the magical barrier. The vampires had swarmed over the three like ants attracted to a fallen piece of food at a picnic—or a lonely raccoon carcass on the side of the road.

“Back! Get your hands off me, you inbred spawn!” shouted a red-robed man in a demon’s mask. More demons spewed from within his robes, leaving his torso to hover in the midst of the sweeping vampire forms. I recognized him as Master Pandemonium.

The second individual held his attackers at bay with a rigid silence. The black teenager commanded his power so deftly that I was almost jealous of the control he managed at such a young age. Beams of magical energy shot from his eye, removing his attackers from the equation.

It was the third, though, that I knew would need my help. The purple-haired woman was on her knees, and it was plain to see that it was her spell that had failed. The barrier had sucked the power out of her instead of allowing her to use it to escape. I could hear her shriek in terror—this was not someone who was used to being helpless. She was normally immensely powerful, I knew. The Dream Weaver had probably yet to find her upper limit…until today.

“Stay back, miss!” I shouted, crossing my fingers around each other and pulling up a ward. “You’ll be safe soon enough.”

“If he didn’t look like he was on our side, I’d laugh,” Jinx muttered, reminding me of the reason I never plan on having children.

“Come on, let’s move, guys! There’s a safe place over here!” I yelled, trying not to let the kid get me down. He was just a kid, after all. No sense in taking what he said to heart. Not at all. Uh-huh. Right.

Anyway, I grabbed Dream Weaver’s forearm and pulled her along behind me. Jinx and Master Pandemonium followed closely behind. I was surprised at how far they had actually been from the diner. My way toward them had been unobstructed, but now that I was headed back, it seemed so much further away. The street lamps were haunting, teasing mile markers, and quite a bit of me wished I had the concentration to blow the bastards out if only so that I wouldn’t have to think of them like that.

“Not much further now, guys!” I shouted, blasting away a pair of vampires as they dove in close. They were coming in greater numbers now, drawn out by the sounds of us putting up a fight. We couldn’t have attracted them better if we’d had spotlights.

The diner was close now, to the point that I could actually read the sign out front that listed the specials for a day that would never happen. I turned around so that I could point it out to Jinx, Master Pandemonium, and Dream Weaver, but froze in my tracks. One of the vampires was advancing on Jinx so quickly from what must have been a blind spot. He couldn’t see it coming, its mouth open, fangs glistening with spittle. “Jinx, no!” I screamed.

The vampire continued on, unobstructed. Jinx’s head turned, but his neck was still exposed to the incoming creature. I could see both of the boy’s eyes grow wide, even the one that still glowed with magic. As I watched, the vampire melted away, its skin and flesh burning from the face down.

“It worked! It actually worked!” I heard John shout from the doorway of the diner. Debbi stood behind him, cradling several water balloons that she must have dredged up from god-knows-where.

He followed this with several more holy water-filled balloons, each one landing on a surprised vampire. The vampires scattered in order to preserve themselves for another day, or rather, another hour, as the day didn’t look like it was going to be coming around any time soon. “Get in!” Debbi hissed, and believe me, she didn’t have to tell any of us twice.

The eight of us cramped into the diner with its limited seating (you know, since I flipped up a few of the tables to magically seal the shattered window). We made sure we moved the “Home, Sweet Home” sign to the doorway after it had been blown out by the force of the trio’s attempted escape from Los Angeles, and then we got down to business. “All right,” I said, “before we get into any formalities and all that kind of crap, what the hell were you thinking?”

Dream Weaver looked up at me. “We wanted to leave the city. We had been held captive, and the boy who released us only did it so he could use us. We wanted to get away from it all, this entire situation.”

“I understand, but if you’re magic users worth a whit, you would know that you couldn’t make it out, right?” I asked. Then I shook my head. “Sorry. I shouldn’t be going all ‘bad cop’ on you. I’m just thinking about the other people whose windows might’ve been blown out who didn’t have a magician in the room at the time.”

That kinda killed the mood. “I never intended…” Dream Weaver began, but her words dragged off.

“Look, I shouldn’t have put that on your shoulders,” I said. “The law of unintended consequences and all of that nonsense, right? Can you at least just give us some kind of idea about what’s going on out there?”

“Minoru,” said Master Pandemonium. “It is all the Minoru boy’s fault.”

The Minoru boy? I knew the wizard-witch marriage had produced a daughter, but I hadn’t heard about a son. “What do you mean? Explain it to me.”

“The rumors that have been in this community for ages state that one of the Minoru sons became a vampire in the 1940s,” Master Pandemonium explained. “However, none of the rumors can agree about what, exactly, happened to him after he turned. It is apparent from the magic used tonight that the boy lived on as one of the undead. The entire thing screams of teenage angst.”

I really hadn’t thought of it like that. I mean, I knew the dangers associated with a teenager being given magical capabilities intimately. And I’d had a run-in or two with teenage vampires. Now, on the other hand, magical teenage vampires? This was a first, but it was obvious to me that it was more dangerous than either of the previous combinations. “Do you know what his motivation is?” I asked. “Surely he’s come up with something better than ‘I want to rule the world’ in the sixty-odd years he’s been thinking about it, right?”

“I have no idea, but if it was me? I would want revenge,” said Master Pandemonium.

“On who?” asked Debbi, her arms crossed over her chest.

“On whoever left me behind,” Master Pandemonium said, shrugging.

“He’s after his family, maybe,” I said. “So who does that leave? The Minorus were part of the Pride, and the Pride, well, reportedly expired, killed by the government or something like that, right?”

“We woke up in their basement,” Dream Weaver said. “Apparently they have a teenage daughter. From what I understood from what the Wilder boy and Hayes girl were saying, they and the rest of the Pride’s kids have taken over the running of the city in their parents’ stead.”

“Okay, so there’s this guy’s, what, grandniece? And chances are she’s right out there in the middle of this anyway if they’re following the Pride’s record,” I said, putting my thoughts together.

“Wait a damn second,” said Ray. “The Pride is real? It’s not just an urban legend?”

“Is the Hulk real?” I asked sarcastically.

“You mean that CGI news ratings booster?” Erin asked dryly, rolling her eyes.

“Agh! The Pride was real!” I said. “They’re just, y’know, dead now.” I stared at the group, trying to meet everyone in the eyes. “Look, this must be the thing that the tarot sent me into the city to figure out, you know?”

This time everyone looked at me skeptically. I groaned and took a seat on the barstool.

“Maybe we shouldn’t worry about the vampires,” Jinx said. “The vampires wouldn’t be a problem if we could get out of the city, or maybe get some light into the city, man. It’s all about the barrier.”

“We can’t get out,” Dream Weaver said. “It took everything I had to send us back. We’d have been destroyed if we had kept trying to get through it. Brute force would have the same effect, I would guess.”

“The barrier is next to impossible to get rid of or through,” I said, standing up. “Where’s a saltshaker?”

“No!” shouted the four residents of the diner. I sat back down on my barstool, fuming. Apparently, I had made an impression already.

“All right, so getting through the barrier is a problem,” Dream Weaver said. “What can we really do, though? The heroes are tackling the vampires.”

“You call those kids heroes?” Jinx asked, cocking an eyebrow.

“Not the Pride’s runaways,” Dream Weaver said. “The Champions. I heard War Machine is out there somewhere, no word on the West Coast Avengers. But yes, the heroes are the ones who plan on ending that threat.”

“So we sit and wait?” Ray asked. “I thought all you magic types were heroes, too.”

Master Pandemonium lifted his hand. “Villain, apparently.”

Dream Weaver shrugged. “Misguided.”

Jinx looked at both of them. “I was a hero. Kinda.”

“There goes my faith in you guys,” Erin said, immediately following it with a large slurp of her Coke.

“Look, I know I’m probably annoying the hell out of you, but I was going to be the next Doctor Strange back in the day. I just, y’know, lacked control, maturity, and armpit hair. The point is, we aren’t lightweights here. We can make a difference,” I said.

“How, though?” asked John. He sat in the corner again, one hand shaking as it was closed around his rosary.

“You already have,” I said. “Without you, Jinx would’ve become a vampire. You saved someone’s life.”

“Yeah, thanks on that,” Jinx said nonchalantly.

“So why don’t we just go out and rescue people from their homes?” Debbi asked. “If, I mean, we have to do something?”

“You have some turtlenecks in back that I don’t know about?” Ray asked.

“Hey, do you guys hear that?” Dream Weaver asked.

“Hear what?” Ray asked, grimacing. “The vampires doing something?”

“No,” Dream Weaver said. “That’s…what I mean. They’ve stopped. There’s nothing going on outside. The wisps on the wind, the sounds as they tried to get inside homes…it’s all stopped.”

Debbi’s eyes grew brighter. “Is it over, then?”

“The barrier is still up,” I pointed out.

“Maybe it’s weaker by now,” Jinx suggested. “We could go out there and see what we can do about it. Maybe we could, I don’t know, expedite it, man, speed it through its process.”

“There’s an idea,” I said. “I don’t know how much water it will hold, but if the vampires have quieted down or gone somewhere else for now…let’s see what we can do.” Personally, I was in favor of doing this, because it meant that I might be able to exercise my purpose, my reason for being sent to Los Angeles in the first place—my way to make a difference.

“Everybody grab some water balloons,” Debbi said. She went to the door. Once everyone was situated, she said, “Ready?” We nodded, and she shoved open the door.

If we had thought the silence before was eerie, then this silence in the city was downright horrifying. The vampires were no longer swooping around in their near-silent, owl-like sweep. We moved forward carefully, testing the waters. I was prepared to throw up a shield around us at a second’s notice, in case this was just an ambush and we were the roadkill prepared for the eating.

We got to the barrier without any trouble. Its glow was eerie, because it gave off the only light in the night. Everything around it had a light blue tint to it, including the faces of those around me. It was akin to one of the lava lamps I’d had when I was growing up, but that didn’t make it comforting to me at all.

“Anything you can do?” Debbi asked nervously.

“Let me see. Ready, guys?” I asked. The others nodded that they were prepared. I closed my eyes, and reached out to feel—nothing.

When I opened them, the barrier was gone.

“You did it!” Debbi shouted, but she saw from my open-mouthed state that that was not the case at all. Still, the light of the sun touched me for the first time in twenty-four hours. I couldn’t be too unhappy, could I?

“What’s wrong?” Debbi asked.

I turned from her. “Nothing. The day is saved, right?”

“But not by you?” she asked. “Your grand purpose here didn’t work out?”

“Guess not,” I said, shrugging. The tarot had put me here, but I was apparently useless anyway.

Debbi shook her head. “You’re goofy, you know that?”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

She indicated the others. “You saved seven lives, and you gave John a confidence he never had before. I think that’s enough in my book.”

I took her arm in mine. “Well, seven is a lucky number…” I began, and we walked off into the sunlight.

NEXT: Still confused? Check out the conclusion to the story in Runaways #16 to see what happened to the vampires and how the barrier came down!